To be honest, this was something I did for English class. I got good feedback on it, so I hope you like it.

Unreal

Chapter 1:

I awoke to distant screams and the stench of burning flesh. I opened my eyes, almost zombie like. My vision was blurred and I could not remember where I was or what happened, or why I was on the cold metal floor. I got up slowly, feeling pain throughout my entire body, and a pounding headache. As I arose, I looked around at my surroundings, and suddenly remembered everything.

I was a prisoner aboard a vessel heading to the prison moon. I realized that we must have crashed. All I could remember before was some shouting, and people running back and forth past my cell doorway. I remembered the whole vessel seeming to quake, and a great lurking motion threw me upwards where I smashed my head into the ceiling; Blackness ensued.

My cell door was wide open. In fact, the metal bars were mangled and twisted like some beast had ripped them apart. Staggering, I limped out of my cell that I had gotten so used to. I took one glance around me and confirmed my earlier assumption. We had crashed. Destruction lay ahead of me in the prison hallway. Lights had shattered, littering glass all over the metal floor. Metal beams holding up the ceiling had come loose or fallen completely. Sparks erupted from one of the light fixtures next to me and made me jump. Then the smell got to me again, and I noticed the bodies strewn everywhere, mostly prisoners. Most of the bodies were just lying still, out in the open, like they were thrown around. Some though lay in gruesome piles of their own blood. I looked to the side of me and saw my prison neighbor, Jack, impaled through the chest by the bars of his own cage, which had been twisted at an odd angle.

I realized how lucky I must have been, with only a few scrapes and bruises. I still felt extremely weak however, and with that I decided to get to the sick bay, where there were some bandages.

I made my way over corpses, strewn metal and glass, still limping slightly, to the door that led into the main hall. I pressed the switch to open the door, which was electronic, and nothing happened. I tried again with no luck. I assumed the door was jammed, and with that I pulled the manual over-ride switch. I heard a deep click within the door, and saw it pop up a tad, just enough to slip my fingers underneath. I bent down, almost un-willingly, grasped the bottom of the door with both hands, and lifted with what strength I had left. The door was made of pure steel, and was quite large, enough for maybe two or three people to walk through at a time. However, it worked like a garage door, when you lift it up, it stays up. So I didn’t have to lift it very far, just enough for me to crawl under.
After I had crawled through to the other side, I instantly knew something was wrong. There was nobody in the main halls, not even bodies. I saw a few blood trails however, which looked a bit fresh. I’ve seen blood and death in my days, and I can pretty much tell when a kill is fresh or not. Judging from the corpses in the prison hold, and the blood on the ground here in the main hall…whoever had been here, they were killed after the crash.

I made my way down the familiar hallway and soon came across the sick bay. I had been to the sick bay before, since the travel time from Earth to the prison moon can take over a month. I entered the room and almost puked. I forgot that there was a huge riot the other day, and about thirteen guys were sent here to get patched up for the remainder of the week. They were all dead, and sickbay was much to small not to be tripping over the bodies. It looked like a nuke hit the place. Everything, from the electronic machinery, to the glass cabinets, where utterly torn apart. Someone’s hand stuck out from one of the fallen over bookshelves. The prisoners had nothing better to do in here other then read. I stepped in further and heard a sick squash under my boot. I looked down and realized I was standing in an inch thick pool of blood. It was so vivid I could almost see my reflection in it as if I were looking in water.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and made my way to one of the mangled cabinets. I reached under, searching with my hand, and found some bandages. They were slightly blood stained. I tore off several pieces from the roll and started applying the patches to my cuts and wounds.

I was halfway through putting on the third patch when I heard a loud crash, then a scream. My first thought was, “Oh thank god I’m not the only one alive!” I ran out of the sickbay, and back into the main hallway. I looked around and saw no one. Suddenly, gun shots coming from my left. I looked and saw flashes coming from underneath another garage type door. I looked up and saw the insignia inscribed above the door, and realized that this lead to the bay doors. This was my way to escape.

“Oh god no! NO!”

The gunshots continued, and I heard something else like a grumble or gargling sound. I hesitated on if I should open the door or not. Whatever was happening on the other side, I did not want any part of it.

Then a loud roar bellowed from behind the door, and a sound which sounded vaguely like a sword being pulled from it’s sheath echoed through the hall. I heard a sickeningly watery sound, like someone stepping on a pile of beets, then nothing. My heart was pounding in my chest, adrenaline flowing through me. There was a soft thump, then footsteps fading away to a deadening silence.

I stood, frozen, for another 5 minutes, just listening to dead air. I was so scared that I didn’t even realize that I still had the roll of bandages in my fist, which were marked from my fingernails digging into the soft tissue like cloth.

I took a deep breath, opened the door slowly, and gaped at what I saw next. It was Mike, one of the other prisoners I had become accustomed to seeing ever so often. He was laying face down in a thick pool of his own blood, gun in his hand. His head was barely hanging on to what was left of his neck, which seemed to have been slashed open by some sort of sword or blade. There was blood splattered in a spider web like pattern on the nearby wall, dripping down onto the floor.

I took a closer look at the blood pooled under Mike’s corpse, and realized there were footprints of something leading away from the body. I couldn’t make it out to well, since the blood was pooling into the footprint to fill up the space, but from what I saw, it did not look human. In fact it reminded me of a T-Rex foot to be honest. It had an overall triangular shape, with three “toes” at the wider part of the triangle. Whatever planet we crashed upon, there was life here, which apparently did not like us.

I shook the thought out of my mind, and bent down to grab Mike’s gun. Although it didn’t do him any good, I still felt safer with it than without it. I pried it from his fingers, and checked the clip to see how much ammo I had. This magazine had a round of twenty shots, and thirteen of them had been used. What could take 13 hits, and keep going? I didn’t even see any blood from the other creature.

I made my way down the rest of the hallway ever so cautiously, taking step by step as softly as I could. Every step felt like two hours, one hour to raise my foot, the next to set it down. When I turned the corner, I looked and saw that the bay doors had already been open. Maybe someone got out, I thought, or something had gotten in. Either way I was home free from the ship that was now a piece of scrap metal.

There was light coming from outside, very bright, and I had to hold up my hand in front of my eyes. I stepped outside feeling cool air swarm around me. I lowered my hand and saw a plain of grass, trees, and a mountain in the distance. For an alien world I thought, this did not look so alien. I took a couple steps outside, hearing unfamiliar animals here and there. Looking up I noticed that the trees were abnormally tall compared to Earth’s standards, as was the grass swarming around my feet.

After I was done gaping at the landscape, I did a one eighty, and saw the mangled craft I had just come out of. For the most bit, the whole outside of the ship had turned from a dark grey metallic color, to many pitch black spots here and there that did not reflect at all like the ship used too. The engines at the back were aflame, and the front of the ship was smashed in like the hood of a car when it hits a brick wall. The ship had hit a rock wall, the side of an enormous mountain that shot straight up into the sky and out of sight. The bottom was extremely scraped and burned, and there were pieces of debris littered everywhere. There was what looked to be about a mile long trench, where the ship and first landed, and then torn through the ground all the way to the base of the mountain.

I realized that this was a chance for me to start my life over, to escape my past. I took my weapon firm in hand, knowing that I would more than most likely need it sooner or later, and started my journey onward.